Smith was the foremost urban leader of the Efficiency Movement in the United States and was noted for achieving a wide range of reforms as governor in the 1920s. The son of an Irish-American mother and a Civil War veteran father, he was raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge, where he resided for his entire life. Like many other New York politicians of his era, he was also linked to the notorious Tammany Hallpolitical machine that controlled New York City's politics, although he remained personally untarnished by corruption.[1] Smith was a strong opponent of Prohibition, which he did not think could be enforced, and viewed it as an over-extension of the government's constitutional power. He was also the first Catholic to be nominated by a major party. His candidacy mobilized Catholic votes, especially from women, who had only recently received federal suffrage. It also brought out the anti-Catholic vote, which was especially strong among white conservative Democrats in the South, although Smith was still successful within the states of the Deep South.[2][3]

As a committed "wet" who opposed the prohibition laws, Smith attracted two groups: those who wanted their beer, wine and liquor and did not like dealing with criminal bootleggers, and those who were outraged that new criminal gangs had taken over the streets in most large and medium-sized cities.[4] Many Protestants feared his candidacy, including GermanLutherans and Southern Baptists, believing that the Pope in Rome would dictate his policies. Incumbent Republican Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was greatly aided by national prosperity and the absence of American involvement in war; Smith lost in a landslide to him, losing six southern states but carrying the Deep South. Four years later, Smith sought the 1932 nomination but was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, his former ally and successor as Governor of New York. Smith entered business in New York City, became involved in the construction and promotion of the Empire State Building, and became an increasingly vocal opponent of Roosevelt's New Deal.

Early life

Al Smith attended St. James school through the eighth grade, his only formal education.

Smith was born at 174 South Street, and raised in the Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; he resided here for his entire life.[5] His mother, Catherine (née Mulvihill), was the daughter of Maria Marsh and Thomas Mulvihill, who were immigrants from County Westmeath, Ireland.[6] His father, Alfred Emanuele Ferraro, took the anglicized name Alfred E. Smith ('ferraro' means 'blacksmith' or 'smith' in Italian). The elder Alfred was the son of Italian and German[7][8] immigrants. He served with the 11th New York Fire Zouaves in the opening months of the Civil War.

Smith grew up with his family struggling financially in the Gilded Age; New York City matured and completed major infrastructure projects. The Brooklyn Bridge was being constructed nearby. "The Brooklyn Bridge and I grew up together", Smith would later recall.[9] His four grandparents were Irish, German, Italian, and Anglo-Irish,[10] but Smith identified with the Irish-American community and became its leading spokesman in the 1920s.

His father Alfred owned a small trucking firm, but died when the boy was 13. Aged 14, Smith had to drop out of St. James parochial school to help support the family, and worked at a fish market for seven years. Prior to dropping out of school, he served as an altar boy, and was strongly influenced by the Catholic priests he worked with.[11] He never attended high school or college, and claimed he learned about people by studying them at the Fulton Fish Market, where he worked for $12 per week (equivalent to $323 today). His acting skills made him a success on the amateur theater circuit. He became widely known, and developed the smooth oratorical style that characterized his political career. On May 6, 1900, Al Smith married Catherine Ann Dunn, with whom he had five children.[1]

Political career

Smith at his desk in the New York Assembly in 1913

In his political career, Smith built on his working-class beginnings, identifying himself with immigrants and campaigning as a man of the people. Although indebted to the Tammany Hallpolitical machine, particularly to its boss, "Silent" Charlie Murphy, he remained untarnished by corruption and worked for the passage of progressive legislation.[1] It was during his early unofficial jobs with Tammany Hall that he gained renown as an excellent speaker.[12] Smith's first political job was in 1895, as an investigator in the office of the Commissioner of Jurors as appointed by Tammany Hall.

State legislature

Smith was first elected to the New York State Assembly (New York Co., 2nd D.) in 1904, and was repeatedly elected to office, serving through 1915.[11] After being approached by Frances Perkins, an activist to improve labor practices, Smith sought to improve the conditions of factory workers. He served as vice chairman of the state commission appointed to investigate factory conditions after 146 workers died in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Meeting the families of the deceased Triangle factory workers left a strong impression on him. Together with Perkins, Smith crusaded against dangerous and unhealthy workplace conditions and championed corrective legislation.[12][13]

The Commission was chaired by State Senator Robert F. Wagner and co-chaired by Smith. They held a series of widely publicized investigations around the state, interviewing 222 witnesses and taking 3500 pages of testimony. They hired field agents to do on-site inspections of factories. Starting with the issue of fire safety, they studied broader issues of the risks of injury in the factory environment. Their findings led to thirty-eight new laws regulating labor in New York State, and gave each of them a reputation as leading progressive reformers working on behalf of the working class. In the process, they changed Tammany's reputation from mere corruption to progressive endeavors to help the workers.[14] New York City's Fire Chief John Kenlon told the investigators that his department had identified more than 200 factories where conditions resulted in risk of a fire like that at the Triangle Factory.[15] The State Commission's reports led to the modernization of the state's labor laws, making New York State "one of the most progressive states in terms of labor reform."[16][17] New laws mandated better building access and egress, fireproofing requirements, the availability of fire extinguishers, the installation of alarm systems and automatic sprinklers, better eating and toilet facilities for workers, and limited the number of hours that women and children could work. In the years from 1911 to 1913, sixty of the sixty-four new laws recommended by the Commission were legislated with the support of Governor William Sulzer.[18]

In 1911, the Democrats obtained a majority of seats in the State Assembly, and Smith became Majority Leader and Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. The following year, following the loss of the majority, he became the Minority Leader. When the Democrats reclaimed the majority after the next election, he was elected Speaker for the 1913 session. He became Minority Leader again in 1914 and 1915. In November 1915, he was elected Sheriff of New York County, New York. By now he was a leader of the Progressive movement in New York City and state. His campaign manager and top aide was Belle Moskowitz, a daughter of Jewish immigrants.[1]

In 1919, Smith gave the famous speech "A man as low and mean as I can picture",[19] making a drastic break with William Randolph Hearst. Publisher Hearst, known for his notoriously sensationalist and largely left-wing position in the state Democratic Party, was the leader of its populist wing in the city. He had combined with Tammany Hall in electing the local administration, and had attacked Smith for starving children by not reducing the cost of milk.[20]

Smith lost his bid for re-election at the New York State election of 1920, but was again elected governor in 1922, 1924 and 1926, with James A. Farley managing his campaign. In his 1922 re-election, he embraced his position as an anti-prohibitionist. Smith offered alcohol to guests at the Executive Mansion in Albany, and repealed the Prohibition enforcement statute: the Mullan-Gage law.[21] Governor Smith became known nationally as a progressive who sought to make government more efficient and more effective in meeting social needs. Smith's young assistant Robert Moses built the nation's first state park system and reformed the civil service, later gaining appointment as Secretary of State of New York. During Smith's term, New York strengthened laws governing workers' compensation, women's pensions and children and women's labor with the help of Frances Perkins, soon to be President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Labor Secretary.

1928 election

Reporter Frederick William Wile made the oft-repeated observation that Smith was defeated by "the three P's: Prohibition, Prejudice and Prosperity".[23] The Republican Party was still benefiting from an economic boom, as well as a failure to reapportion Congress and the electoral college following the 1920 census, which had registered a 15 percent increase in the urban population. The party was biased toward small-town and rural areas. Its presidential candidate Herbert Hoover did little to alter these events.

Historians agree that prosperity, along with widespread anti-Catholic sentiment against Smith, made Hoover's election inevitable.[24] He defeated Smith by a landslide in the 1928 election, carrying five southern states in crossover voting by conservative white Democrats (since the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South at the turn of the century, whites dominated voting).

The fact that Smith was Catholic and the descendant of Catholic immigrants was instrumental in his loss of the election of 1928.[11] Historical hostilities between Protestants and Catholics had been carried by national groups to the United States by immigrants, and centuries of Protestant domination allowed myths and superstitions about Catholicism to flourish. Long established Protestants had viewed the waves of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe since the mid-19th century with suspicion. In addition, many Protestants carried old fears related to extravagant claims of one religion against the other which dated back to the European wars of religion. They feared that Smith would answer to the Pope rather than the United States Constitution. White rural conservatives in the South also believed that his close association with Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine in Manhattan, showed that he tolerated corruption in government (while they overlooked their own brands of it). Another major controversial issue was the continuation of Prohibition, which was widely considered a problem to enforce. Smith was personally in favor of the relaxation or repeal of Prohibition laws, because they had given rise to more criminality. The Democratic Party split North and South on the issue, with the more rural South continuing to favor Prohibition. During the campaign, Smith tried to duck the issue with non-committal statements.[25]

Smith was an articulate proponent of good government and efficiency, as was Hoover. Smith swept the entire Catholic vote, which had been split in 1920 and 1924 between the parties; he attracted millions of Catholics, generally ethnic whites, to the polls for the first time, especially women, who were first allowed to vote in 1920. He lost important Democratic constituencies in the rural North as well as in southern cities and suburbs. However, he successfully won votes in the Deep South, thanks in part to the appeal of his running mate, Senator Joseph Robinson from Arkansas, but he lost five southern states to Hoover. Smith carried the ten most populous cities in the United States, an indication of the rising power of the urban areas and their new demographics. In addition to these issues, Smith was not a very good campaigner. His campaign theme song, "The Sidewalks of New York", had little appeal among rural folks, and they found that his 'city' accent, when heard on radio, seemed slightly foreign. Smith narrowly lost New York State, whose electors were biased against rural upstate and largely Protestant districts. However, in 1928 his fellow Democrat Roosevelt (a Protestant of Dutch old-line stock) was elected to replace him as governor of New York.[26] James A. Farley left Smith's camp to run Franklin D. Roosevelt's successful campaign for Governor, and later Roosevelt's successful campaigns for the Presidency in 1932 and 1936.

Al Smith giving a speech

Voter realignment

Some political scientists believe that the 1928 election started a voter realignment that helped develop the New Deal coalition of Franklin D. Roosevelt.[27] As one political scientist explains, "...not until 1928, with the nomination of Al Smith, a northeastern reformer, did Democrats make gains among the urban, blue-collar and Catholic voters who were later to become core components of the New Deal coalition and break the pattern of minimal class polarization that had characterized the Fourth Party System."[28] However, Allan Lichtman's quantitative analysis suggests that the 1928 results were based largely on religion and are not a useful barometer of the voting patterns of the New Deal era.[29]

Finan (2003) says Smith is an underestimated symbol of the changing nature of American politics in the first half of the last century. He represented the rising ambitions of urban, industrial America at a time when the hegemony of rural, agrarian America was in decline, although many states had legislatures and congressional delegations biased toward rural areas because of lack of redistricting after censuses. Smith was connected to the hopes and aspirations of immigrants, especially Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe. Smith was a devout Catholic, but his struggles against religious bigotry were often misinterpreted when he fought the religiously inspired Protestant morality imposed by prohibitionists.

Opposition to Roosevelt and the New Deal

Smith felt slighted by Roosevelt during the latter's governorship. They became rivals for the Democratic Party presidential primaries, 1932 after Smith decided to run for the nomination. At the convention, Smith's animosity toward Roosevelt was so great that he put aside longstanding rivalries and managed to work with William Gibbs McAdoo and William Randolph Hearst to try to block FDR's nomination for several ballots. This unlikely coalition fell apart when Smith refused to work on finding a compromise candidate; instead, he maneuvered to become the nominee. After losing the nomination, Smith eventually campaigned for Roosevelt in 1932, giving a particularly important speech on behalf of the Democratic nominee at Boston on October 27 in which he "pulled out all the stops."[30]

Franklin D. Roosevelt (left) and Al Smith (right) in Albany, New York

Smith became highly critical of Roosevelt's New Deal policies, which he deemed a betrayal of good-government progressive ideals and ran counter to the goal of close cooperation with business. Smith joined the American Liberty League, an organization founded by conservative Democrats who disapproved of Roosevelt's New Deal measures and tried to rally public opinion against the New Deal. In 1934, Smith joined forces with wealthy business executives, who provided most of the League's funds. The League published pamphlets and sponsored radio programs, arguing that the New Deal was destroying personal liberty. However, the League failed to gain support in the 1934 and 1936 elections and rapidly declined in influence. It was officially dissolved in 1940.[31][32] Smith's antipathy to Roosevelt and his policies was so great that he supported Republican presidential candidates Alfred M. Landon (in the 1936 election) and Wendell Willkie (in the 1940 election).[1]

Although personal resentment was one factor in Smith's break with Roosevelt and the New Deal, Christopher Finan (2003) argues that Smith was consistent in his beliefs and politics—suggesting that Smith always believed in social mobility, economic opportunity, religious tolerance, and individualism. Despite the break between the men, Smith and Eleanor Roosevelt remained close. In 1936, while Smith was in Washington making a vehement radio attack on the President, she invited him to stay at the White House. To avoid embarrassing the Roosevelts, he declined. Historian Robert Slayton notes that Smith and Franklin Roosevelt did not reconcile until a brief meeting in June 1941, and he also suggests that during the early 1940s the antipathy which Smith held toward his former ally had waned.[33] Upon the death of Smith's wife Katie in May 1944, FDR sent Smith a note of personal condolences; Smith's grandchildren later recalled that Smith was "greatly touched by it."[34]

Business life and later years

After the 1928 election, Smith became the president of Empire State, Inc., the corporation that built and operated the Empire State Building. Construction for the building symbolically began on March 17, 1930, St. Patrick's Day, per Smith's instructions. Smith's grandchildren cut the ribbon when the world's tallest skyscraper opened on May 1, 1931, which was May Day, an international labor celebration. Its construction had been completed in only 13 months, a record for such a large project. As with the Brooklyn Bridge, which Smith had seen being built from his Lower East Side boyhood home, the Empire State Building was both a vision and an achievement that had been constructed by combining the interests of all, rather than being divided by the interests of a few. Smith continued to promote the Empire State Building, which was derided as the "Empty State Building" due to a lack of tenants, in the years following its construction.[35][36]

Al Smith (right) in December 1929 during his time as director of Empire State, Inc.

Smith was an early and vocal critic of the Nazi regime in Germany. He supported the Anti-Nazi boycott of 1933 and addressed a mass-meeting at Madison Square Garden against Nazism that March.[39] His speech was included in the 1934 anthology Nazism: An Assault on Civilization.[40] In 1938, Smith took to the airwaves to denounce Nazi brutality in the wake of Kristallnacht. His words were published in The New York Times article "Text of the Catholic Protest Broadcast" of November 17, 1938.[41][42]

Like most New York City businessmen, Smith enthusiastically supported American military involvement in World War II. Although he was not asked by Roosevelt to play any role in the war effort, Smith was an active and vocal proponent of FDR's attempts to amend the Neutrality Act in order to allow "Cash and Carry" sales of war equipment to be made to the British. Smith spoke on behalf of the policy in October 1939, to which FDR responded directly: "Very many thanks. You were grand."[43]

In 1939 Smith was appointed a Papal Chamberlain of the Sword and Cape, one of the highest honors which the Papacy bestowed on a layman. In the early 21st century, this honor is styled a Gentleman of His Holiness.

Camp Smith, a State owned military installation of the New York Army National Guard in Cortlandt Manor near Peekskill, NY, about 30 miles (48 km) north of New York City, at the northern border of Westchester County and consists of 1,900 acres (7.7 km2).

Namesakes of Al Smith

Alfred E. Smith Memorial at New York Medical College

The Alfred Smith School, PS 163

Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the South Bronx

1918 was the first time women voted for governor of New York, and Alfred E. Smith was the first governor elected with more than 1 million votes. But, given the much-expanded electorate, his historic total still represented only a plurality of votes.

For comparison, in the New York Gubernatorial Election of 1916, Charles S. Whitman (whom Smith defeated in 1918) had won a 52.63% majority with 850,020 votes.

The total ballots cast for governor in 1918 was 2,192,970. Besides the votes for the above candidates, there were 43,630 blank votes; 16,892 spoilt votes; and 530 scattering votes.[46]

The Governor's term was extended to four years in 1938, Article IV, New York Constitution.

Craig, Douglas B. After Wilson: The Struggle for Control of the Democratic Party, 1920–1934 (1992) online edition see Chap. 6 "The Problem of Al Smith" and Chap. 8 "'Wall Street Likes Al Smith': The Election of 1928"

Degler, Carl N. (1964). "American Political Parties and the Rise of the City: An Interpretation". Journal of American History. 51 (1): 41–59. doi:10.2307/1917933. JSTOR1917933.